The spies of life

Eleven films from both sides of the Iron Curtain, some of them hardly ever seen before, were selected to represent the wide spectrum of cinematic responses to the Cold War at the time it happened.

Even though the spy film genre is practically dead, the issue is still relevant: as curator Oliver Baumgarten points out, WikiLeaks and Google Street view are simply modern forms of spying.

The program begins on June 1 with the Romanian farce S-a furat o bomba(A Bomb was Stolen, photo), a film without dialogue from 1961, but don’t miss the more well known Fritz Lang film, The 1,000 eyes of Dr. Mabuse which today looks almost like a documentary on surveillance and information gathering.

The Celluloid Curtain – Europe’s Cold War in Film, Through June 22 | www.dhm.de/kino